Description

There is a large and growing interest in the development of automated systems to provide health services to patients and consumers. In the last two decades, applications informed by research in health communication have been developed, e.g., for promoting healthy behavior and for managing chronic diseases. While the value that these types of applications can offer to the community in terms of cost, access, and convenience is clear, there are still major challenges facing design of effective health communication systems in terms of accessibility, trust, expert-to-lay knowledge translation, and persuasiveness. It is proposed that some of these challenges can be addressed by use of AI techniques in combination with empirically-based theoretical frameworks from the field of health communication and related areas. This symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to identify possible solutions.

AI researchers are invited to submit papers on their work related to health communication. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
•    Communication interventions
•    Games, conversational agents, or dialogue systems for healthy behavior promotion
•    Intelligent interactive monitoring of patient’s environment and needs
•    Intelligent interfaces supporting access to healthcare
•    Patient-tailored decision support, explanation for informed consent, and retrieval and summarization of on-line healthcare information
•    Risk communication and visualization
•    Tailored access to electronic medical records
•    Tailoring health information for low-literacy, low-numeracy, or under-served audiences
•    Virtual healthcare counselors
•    Virtual patients for training healthcare professionals

Scholars from health communication disciplines are invited to submit papers on the following issues as they pertain to the symposium goals:
•    Health literacy
•    Healthcare provider-consumer communication
•    Risk communication, including written and visual formats
•    Use of behavioral, persuasion, and argumentation theories for healthy behavior promotion.

Papers will be published through the AAAI Spring Symposium Report Series. Participants presenting papers will be invited to submit expanded versions to a journal special issue on this topic.